On April 5, 2010, a fireball ripped through underground shafts at the Upper Big Branch mine in Montcoal, West Virginia, killing twenty-nine miners. It was the worst mining disaster in the United States in over forty years. When I heard the news on the radio that morning, my first thought was, “I bet it’s a Massey mine.” And it was. Under the ruthless leadership of CEO Don Blankenship, Massey Energy had unapologetically accumulated one of the worst safety records of any coal company in the country.

Between January 2009 and the day of the explosion, the U.S. Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) cited the Upper Big Branch mine for 639 violations, and in the past decade, fifty-four miners have been killed in Massey mines. Jeff Harris, a former Massey employee who quit to work for a union mine, told a Senate committee three weeks after the explosion that the company routinely chose productivity over safety. “Soon as the inspector would leave the property,” Harris said of Upper Big Branch, “they jerk all the ventilation back down and start mining coal.” Unfortunately, as a Labor Department investigation later revealed, the ventilation system could have played a significant role in preventing the methane buildup that ignited the explosion on April 5.

Testifying before the House Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, surviving miners from Upper Big Branch described repeated ventilation violations that left flammable coal dust collecting on conveyor belts. That was nothing new in a Massey mine. In the fall of 2005, Blankenship sent a memo to employees that read, “If any of you have been asked by your group presidents, your supervisors, engineers or anyone else to do anything other than run coal (i.e., build overcasts, do construction jobs, or whatever) you need to ignore them and run coal.” That “whatever” might have included stopping a conveyor belt long enough to remove combustible coal waste — on January 19, 2006, a fire broke out along a belt at a Massey mine in West Virginia, killing two men.

[1] In response to the naming of the Wildcat Coal Lodge, writer Wendell Berry withdrew all of the personal papers he had donated to the university’s special-collections library.

Twenty-four days after the tragedy at Upper Big Branch, two more miners were killed, this time in my home state of Kentucky, because a roof collapsed on them 500 feet underground. That occurred at the Dotiki mine, which seemed to follow Blankenship’s premise that installing support beams to stabilize roofs gets in the way of running coal; the mine had been cited for 2,973 violations in the previous five years. (The Dotiki mine was operated by a subsidiary of Alliance Resources, whose chief executive, Joe Craft, had recently brokered a deal with my own employer, the University of Kentucky. Last October, Craft pledged $7 million to build a new dorm for the basketball team if, and only if, UK agreed to name the building the Wildcat Coal Lodge. The dorm opened last year.)[1]

As I pondered all of these violations and deaths, a question formed over and over in my mind: What if the workers themselves had owned those mines? That question led to others. Unionized mines do a better job of maintaining worker safety than nonunion ones; would a worker-owned mine be better still? Would the ventilation curtains have remained in place even after the inspectors left? Would the workers have sent themselves a memo, like Don Blankenship’s, pointing out the importance of profits over their own lives? If the miners themselves had owned the mine, would they still be alive?

[2] I also discovered an outfit far beyond the southern mountains, in Wyoming, called the Kiewit Mining Group, whose website touts its “broad-based employee ownership.” I checked out the safety record of its Buckskin Mine in Campbell County. According to the U.S. Mine Safety and Health Administration, Kiewit harvests on average about 15 million tons of coal there each year, and in sixteen years has been cited for only thirty-nine injuries and zero deaths.

I began doing some research to see if any such mines exist among the coalfields of Appalachia, but I could find none. From 1917 to 1927, however, a cooperative mining town called Himlerville did exist in Martin County, Kentucky, across the Tug Fork River from the notorious company towns of “Bloody” Mingo County, West Virginia.[2] The Himler Coal Company was founded by a Hungarian coal miner named Henrich Himler on the premise that the workers would be the stockholders and the stockholders would be the workers. Each year the company’s profits were distributed as dividends, and every miner, no matter his position, shared equally in stock bonuses.

At first Himlerville flourished, with handsome cottages, gardens, and indoor plumbing. It had a library, an auditorium, a school, and a bake shop. Residents didn’t suffer from typhoid, as they did across the river in Mingo County, nor did gun thugs patrol the grounds to intimidate miners and thwart attempts at collective bargaining. By 1922, the Himler Coal Company had raised its capital base from $500,000 to $2 million, and so decided to open two new mines. But then coal prices plunged, and the railroads brought in competition from larger corporations. “In 1927, the company was sold at auction to private capitalists,” writes historian Ronald Eller, “and the only effort at cooperative mining in the southern mountains came to an end.” Today, only Henrich Himler’s dilapidated Victorian home, in what’s now called Beauty, Kentucky, stands as evidence of the experiment.

One can say today about an Appalachian deep mine what Sarah Ogan Gunning sang almost eighty years ago in her anthem “Come All You Coal Miners”:

Coal mining is the most dangerous work in our land today.Plenty of dirty slaving work and very little pay.

The pay has gotten better, thanks to unions, but the work remains deadly. And Gunning, who had watched children starve to death in coal camps, meant it when she sang the last line: “Let’s sink this capitalist system to the darkest pits of hell.” Of course in today’s America, this sentiment represents the worst kind of heresy: a denial of capitalism’s benevolent hand and the free market’s capacious ability to best know our human needs. It’s socialism, wealth-spreading, devil-worship.

But what if it isn’t? Pause for a moment to consider how this country might look if we did shift wealth away from predatory lenders and speculators, toward real workers who produce real wealth, in the form of goods and services? What if this shift represented a radical and ethical form of democracy — one grounded in trust, decent work, and marketplace morality?

The financial crisis of 2008 had a long gestation period that can be traced back to 1783, when Alexander Hamilton persuaded Continental Army soldiers, desperate for cash, to sell their war bonds to his speculating friends at one-thirtieth of their value. In the earliest days of the republic, Hamilton and financier–politician Robert Morris were making shady deals to funnel American wealth to the banking class of New York. Hamilton wanted to centralize the country’s wealth and power as fervently as his nemesis Thomas Jefferson wanted a decentralized nation of agrarian, self-sufficient wards. But of course we adopted Hamilton’s vision, not Jefferson’s, and as a result the United States now has the largest income gap of any country in the northern hemisphere — one that is now wider than at any point in our country’s history.

In their 2009 book, The Spirit Level, epidemiologists Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett concluded that every societal problem, without exception, can be tied directly to income inequality. The United States has higher levels of mental illness, infant mortality, obesity, violence, incarceration, and substance abuse than almost all other “developed” countries. And we have the worst environmental record in the world. When they died, the twenty-nine West Virginia miners were digging coal that the rest of us consume twice as fast as Americans did in the 1970s. Yet still we leave unquestioned the overarching goal of infinite economic growth on a planet of finite resources. The American economist Kenneth Boulding once remarked, “Anyone who believes that exponential growth can go on forever is either a madman or an economist.” But as we listen daily to the president, to members of Congress, and to the financial analysts who sail by on cable news, the dominant message is that endless economic growth is this country’s singular destiny.

In his biography of Hamilton, Ron Chernow wrote, “Today, we are indisputably the heirs to Hamilton’s America, and to repudiate his legacy is, in many ways, to repudiate the modern world.” Exactly. We are indeed Hamilton’s heirs, and to repudiate his legacy will mean repudiating what modern capitalism has brought us: toxic loans, toxic securities, toxic energy sources, and toxic growth.

But what if we replaced our Hamiltonian economy with a Jeffersonian one? Or, put in other terms, what if we took as our model not an economy of unchecked growth, but one based on the natural laws of the watershed? By its very nature, a watershed is self-sufficient, symbiotic, conservative, decentralized, and diverse. It circulates its own wealth over and over. It generates no waste, and doesn’t “externalize” the cost of “production” onto other watersheds. In a watershed, all energy is renewable and all resource use is sustainable. The watershed purifies air and water, holds soil in place, enriches humus, and sequesters carbon. It represents both a metaphor and a model for an entirely new definition of economy, whereby our American system of exchange in the realms of wealth and energy is brought into line with the most important and inescapable economy of nature.

FEATURED ON HARPERS.ORG

America’s Constitution was once celebrated as a radical and successful blueprint for democratic governance, a model for fledgling republics across the world. But decades of political gridlock, electoral corruption, and dysfunction in our system of government have forced scholars, activists, and citizens to question the document’s ability to address the thorniest issues of modern ­political life.

Does the path out of our current era of stalemate, minority rule, and executive abuse require amending the Constitution? Do we need a new constitutional convention to rewrite the document and update it for the twenty-­first century? Should we abolish it entirely?

This spring, Harper’s Magazine invited five lawmakers and scholars to New York University’s law school to consider the constitutional crisis of the twenty-­first century. The event was moderated by Rosa Brooks, a law professor at Georgetown and the author of How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything: Tales from the Pentagon.

About fifteen years ago, my roommate and I developed a classification system for TV and movies. Each title was slotted into one of four categories: Good-Good; Bad-Good; Good-Bad; Bad-Bad. The first qualifier was qualitative, while the second represented a high-low binary, the title’s aspiration toward capital-A Art or lack thereof.

Some taxonomies were inarguable. The O.C., a Fox series about California rich kids and their beautiful swimming pools, was delightfully Good-Bad. Paul Haggis’s heavy-handed morality play, Crash, which won the Oscar for Best Picture, was gallingly Bad-Good. The films of Francois Truffaut, Good-Good; the CBS sitcom Two and a Half Men, Bad-Bad.

In a Walmart parking lot in Portsmouth, Virginia, in 2015, a white police officer named Stephen Rankin shot and killed an unarmed, eighteen-­year-­old black man named William Chapman. “This is my second one,” he told a bystander seconds after firing the fatal shots, seemingly in reference to an incident four years earlier, when he had shot and killed another unarmed man, an immigrant from Kazakhstan. Rankin, a Navy veteran, had been arresting Chapman for shoplifting when, he claimed, Chapman charged him in a manner so threatening that he feared for his life, leaving him no option but to shoot to kill—­the standard and almost invariably successful defense for officers when called to account for shooting civilians. Rankin had faced no charges for his earlier killing, but this time, something unexpected happened: Rankin was indicted on a charge of first-­degree murder by Portsmouth’s newly elected chief prosecutor, thirty-­one-year-­old Stephanie Morales. Furthermore, she announced that she would try the case herself, the first time she had ever prosecuted a homicide. “No one could remember us having an actual prosecution for the killing of an unarmed person by the police,” Morales told me. “I got a lot of feedback, a lot of people saying, ‘You shouldn’t try this case. If you don’t win, it may affect your reelection. Let someone else do it.’ ”

I was in Midtown, sitting by a dry fountain, making a list of all the men I’d slept with since my last checkup—doctor’s orders. Afterward, I would head downtown and wait for Quimby at the bar, where there were only alcoholics and the graveyard shift this early. I’d just left the United Nations after a Friday morning session—likely my last. The agenda had included resolutions about a worldwide ban on plastic bags, condemnation of a Slobodan Miloševic statue, sanctions on Israel, and a truth and reconciliation commission in El Salvador. Except for the proclamation opposing the war criminal’s marble replica, everything was thwarted by the United States and a small contingent of its allies. None of this should have surprised me. Some version of these outcomes had been repeating weekly since World War II.

I spent thirty-eight years in prison and have been a free man for just under two. After killing a man named Thomas Allen Fellowes in a drunken, drugged-up fistfight in 1980, when I was nineteen years old, I was sentenced to life without the possibility of parole. Former California governor Jerry Brown commuted my sentence and I was released in 2017, five days before Christmas. The law in California, like in most states, grants the governor the right to alter sentences. After many years of advocating for the reformation of the prison system into one that encourages rehabilitation, I had my life restored to me.

“Nowadays, most states let just about anybody who wants a concealed-handgun permit have one; in seventeen states, you don’t even have to be a resident. Nobody knows exactly how many Americans carry guns, because not all states release their numbers, and even if they did, not all permit holders carry all the time. But it’s safe to assume that as many as 6 million Americans are walking around with firearms under their clothes.”